Buried Prey

A house demolition provides an unpleasant surprise for Minneapolis - the bodies of two girls, wrapped in plastic. It looks like they've been there a long time. Lucas Davenport knows exactly how long.In 1985, Davenport was a young cop with a reputation for recklessness, and the girls' disappearance was a big deal. His bosses ultimately declared the case closed, but he never agreed with that. Now that he has a chance to investigate it all over again, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: It wasn't just the bodies that were buried. It was the truth.

John Sandford is at the absolute top of his game in the much awaited (by me, anyway) return of Lucas Davenport, and Richard Ferrone does another superb job as the narrator.
Flashing back to Davenport's earliest days as a beat cop on the Minneapolis police force, we get to meet and get a good feel for the various characters that populate later novels, as well as get a handle on Davenport's less-than-exemplary motivations and very believable character flaws. It's a great device that allows the listener to enjoy the earlier, more devious Davenport before he became so happily married to the wonderful Weather.
But then we flash forward to the present to find him consumed with personal hatred towards a horrible and truly creepy killer, without really causing too much trouble at home.
In all, it's a great listen that is difficult to interrupt. But like a favorite meal you haven't had in a long time, it's best if you make yourself slow down and enjoy every bite of it.

Deadline: Virgil Flowers, Book 8

In Southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to an end. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed, due to personnel issues. "Issues" is correct. The proposal up for a vote before them is whether to authorize the killing of a local reporter. The vote is four to one in favor.

John Sandford is the most talented writer of this genre, Eric Conger is the best narrator in this medium, and Virgil Flowers is the most likable protagonist you're going to find in any novel. Add to the above a thoroughly venal mid-west school board that would resort to murder to maintain their façade, a dog-napping ring and a rural meth lab, and you've got a story that doesn't so much unfold as spill out uncontrollably and delightfully from the first sentence to the last. As for the possum squeezin's: it's just one of the many analogies and descriptions that Sandford scatters around his books (this one referring to a Bloody Mary) that keep the reader chuckling through some of the grisliest situations. It's a great listen.

Donna Tartt should really stick to writing and leave the reading to others. It's not that there is anything annoying about her voice, but it is not suitable for impressions of young men in college, who come off sounding like adolescent twits rather than the young adults facing serious conundrums that she portrays in this book. Actually, I take that back. Her rendition of Bunny was annoying; so much so that I stopped listening after the first hour or so. Fortunately, I later found myself on a long car trip with nothing else in the queue and I resumed the story with some reservations. My sufferance was rewarded with a compelling story concerning the apparent life of privilege at an exclusive New England college. A small group of students, from actually very different origins, find themselves snarled up in in a suspenseful tangle of debauchery, deceit, murder and blackmail. I found the characters all quite believable if not actually likable and the story unfolded in a very realistic manner. At bottom, it's a warning that one never really gets away with murder. It's worth a listen.

Death Benefits

A careful, methodical young data analyst for a California insurance company, John Walker knows when people will marry, at what age they will most likely have children, and when they will die. All signs point to a long successful career---until Max Stillman, a gruff security consultant, appears without warning at the office. It seems a colleague with whom Walker once had an affair has disappeared after paying a very large death benefit to an impostor.

Thomas Perry has an hysterically droll sense of humor that I did not find in either the Butcher Boy series or in Metzger's Dog (which I didn't find at all funny). However, Perry's fraud investigator in Death Benefits is so droll and understatedly outrageous, I found myself bursting into laughter in the most quotidian situations, and the actuary, John Walker, is his perfect straight man. The narrator, Michael Kramer, does an absolutely perfect job.On more than one occasion I had to stop driving because my eyes were watering so freely. That said, I thought the final chase and conclusion were a little over the top and a little bit of a let down. Funny how another reviewer thought this book lacked Perry's "usual sense of humor" but loved the ending. Go figure. This is one of the few books I've listened to twice, because I just loved the ride, and it was just as enjoyable on the second go-round.

Silken Prey: Lucas Davenport, Book 23

Very early one morning, a Minnesota political fixer answers his doorbell. The next thing he knows, he’s waking up on the floor of a moving car, lying on a plastic sheet, his body wet with blood. When the car stops, a voice says, "Hey, I think he’s breathing." And another voice says, "Yeah? Give me the bat." And that’s the last thing he knows. Davenport is investigating another case when the trail leads to the man’s disappearance, then - very troublingly - to the Minneapolis police department, then - most troublingly of all - to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons.

John Sandford just keeps batting them out of the park with his character-driven detective stories. This one revolves around a particularly dirty political trick and the people who perpetrated it. The characters are utterly believable, the dialogue is crisp, the descriptions are priceless, and the narration, by Richard Ferrone, is as usual, impeccable. If you haven't listened to any of Sandford's "Prey" series, this is as good a place as any to start. If you have, you probably don't need my encouragement to buy it.

The 9th Girl

On a frigid New Year’s Eve in Minneapolis, a young woman’s brutalized body falls from the trunk of a car into the path of oncoming traffic. Questions as to whether she was alive or dead when she hit the icy pavement result in her macabre nickname, Zombie Doe. Unidentified and unidentifiable, she is the ninth nameless female victim of the year, and homicide detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are charged with the task of not only finding out who Zombie Doe is but who in her life hated her enough to destroy her. Was it personal? Or could it just have been a crime of opportunity?

I suppose there is some demand for a book about a tough-but-gentle mom/cop who loves her children but hates people who mutilate and murder innocent-but-misunderstood teenage girls, but I didn't realize I was contributing to it when I plunked down my credit towards this supposed mystery/suspense/thriller. I'm frankly baffled by the good reviews this book has gotten, so I assume there is an appetite for these ingredients: 1: A corpse nicknamed Zombie Doe by the Minneapolis Police Force, because she looked like a zombie bouncing out of the trunk of a speeding car. 2: A curmudgeonly cop with an estranged daughter about the same age as Zombie Doe and a penchant for introspection.3: A conflicted female cop who frets she works too hard and long for society at the expense of her fractured family4: A conflicted female cop's teenaged son who thinks his mother works too long and hard at his expense, but shows real grit in the face of bullying and makes his mother proud because he's actually a great kid even if he's a free thinker and not one of the popular kids. 5: A self-centered mother of a troubled teen-aged girl who cares more about herself than her daughter (Imagine how that's going to end up!). 6: A diabolical serial killer.7: A psychologist with a weakness for troubled teenaged girls and their mothers.

The recipe this book seems to follow is to combine these ingredients (along with a pinch of schmaltz and maybe a dash of self-righteousness ) and just shake and serve.More predictable than mysterious, and more pedantic than suspenseful, this audiobook was about as thrilling as a Public Service Announcement.

Wild Thing: A Novel

It's hard to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed. So hard that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a job accompanying a sexy but self-destructive paleontologist on the world's worst field assignment, Brown has no real choice but to say yes. Even if it means that an army of murderers, mobsters, and international drug dealers-not to mention the occasional lake monster-are about to have a serious Pietro Brnwa problem.

This otherwise funny, fast-paced, smart-allecky, page-turner is seriously marred by the author's irresistible urge to insult a large portion of his readers with repeated, gratuitous cracks about anyone who has an opinion at odds with the uberleft misanthropes that have informed his politics. You can't help but like the protagonist, Pietro Brnwa as the callous, cynical physician on the run from the mafia, now hired to investigate a deadly and farcical lake monster scam in the backwoods of Minnesota. Kind of a cross between Hunter Thompson and Hugh Laurie, Brnwa is lured off his rotten job as shipboard quack aboard a cruise ship by a reclusive billionaire to accompany a sexy paleontologist on this questionable quest. It's a compelling story with some whacky characters and lots of snappy dialogue, but it gets weighed down with a cartoonish cameo by Sarah Palin that might seem funny to those still suffering from a severe case of BDS, but really isn't. The narration is absolutely top-notch, though, and for left-leaning ideologues and global warming alarmists, the pointed and persistent sarcasm directed at those with differing opinions might very well enhance the over-the-top attitude that buoys the book. There is even an epilogue of sorts in which Bazell dispenses entirely with plot and characters and lectures us on the inherent evils of man in general and conservatives in particular. It’s not particularly cogent but it flows with the same wise-ass attitude that constitutes his style, and has an appeal of its own, at least for people who agree with him to begin with or have more patience for pompous pedantry than this listener.

Worst Fears Realized

Stone and his ex-partner, Dino, are facing every policeman's worst fear: the people close to them are being murdered, probably by someone the two of them sent to prison in the past. To complicate matters, Stone finds himself involved in a distracting relationship with a woman who may be as dangerous as she is beautiful. As the body count multiplies, Stone and Dino race against time to find clues to the brilliant killer's identity.

I bought this book hoping that Richard Ferrone's narration could make a mediocre book enjoyable. Surprisingly he managed to do that for the first couple of hours before the sheer implausiblility of Stuart Woods' characters, plot and dialogue made things nearly unlistenable. Stuart Woods clearly has an appreciative audience. I'm just not among them.

The Smoke Jumper

The best selling author of The Horse Whisperer and The Loop returns with this sweeping novel of love and loyalty, guilt and honor, set against the epic backdrop of wilderness firefighting and frontline photojournalism.

I bought this book purely because of the narrator, Eric Conger, who contributes so much to John Sandford's books and surprisingly I was not disappointed. This compelling story is essentially about a love triangle between three very likable people. Perhaps the book's only flaw is that they are too likable. It's a little saccharine and predictable but it's an enjoyable listen, thanks in large part to Eric Conger.

Shock Wave

The thrilling new Virgil Flowers novel from the #1 New York Times best-selling author. The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don't seem to be slowing the project, though, until someone decides to take matters into his own hands.

God, I just love John Sandford, and I must say that Eric Conger is giving Richard Ferrone a run for my money in the narration department. Okay, maybe this story line is a little thin, but the descriptions are priceless, the tangential characters are memorable and Virgil Flowers is such a great guy that it would be impossible to put this book down even if a crazed bomber wasn't out there playing with minds just a step or two ahead of the law. As for the writing,the exquisite vignette of Virgil and Johnson Johnson on their day off, watching Minnesota-style beach volleyball alone is worth the price of the audio book. In short, if you love John Sandford, you'll find Shock Wave a blast. If you don't, well, I wouldn't know.

Daemon

Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can't always be said for the people who design them.

I suppose this must be interesting to people who are on-line gaming fanatics, but unless you are enthralled by endless and detailed descriptions of role-playing computer games, you will soon lose interest or patience. Even someone who thinks he can listen to ANY story while tending to drudge work will eventually find silence preferable.
As someone who is interested in technology and how high tech is affecting society, as well as its bottomless potential for evil, etc., the premise and the reviews of this audiobook led me to think I'd really enjoy it. And maybe the book gets better after six or seven hours... the characters aren't that badly drawn and the premise is intriguing. But god almighty, if I never hear another description of some stupid virtual reality computer game it will be a lifetime too soon.
Clearly there is an audience for this. I'm just trying to warn the unwary.

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